I've been reading some discussion of Marvel- and DC-focused blogs in recent posts on various blogs (gotta love the meta!), and although I am primarily a Marvel reader (and therefore I suppose this is a "Marvel blog" although there's not really enough of it to generalize) I'm not opposed to picking up some DC books. (Well, apart from just how damn much comics cost these days, which does have something to do with my not seeking out new books too actively.) I just don't know enough about them. Didn't read them regularly as a kid, so they lack that "nostalgia buzz" for me, and I don't know the history. (Apart from the Legion of Superheroes. That book I knew. Of course it was relatively easy to be only a LSH reader because most of their stories took place outside of the rest of DC continuity. Or did, as far as I could tell.) And what I did know is no longer valid, is it? Didn't they get rid of Earth-1 and Earth-2 and so forth a few years back?
In general, though, I wouldn't know where to start--which characters would interest me, which wouldn't. Superman always struck me as a bit dull. (Well, he'd have to be. A maverick Superman? You don't want that.) Batman...well, I have a confession. Not long after I started picking up comics again (3-4 years ago?) I got into Batman. I picked up all his books. And damn, does Batman have books! Spider-Man and Wolverine are pikers by comparison. But I read Batman and Batman and Batman, each book with its own slightly (or not so slightly) different take on the character. Some I liked a lot, others not so much. And then I stopped, because the character stopped holding my interest, and I didn't have enough of a tie to the mythology to keep me there.
So I suppose the thing to do if I were to expand my superhero horizons would be to pick up some team books; my older daughter already gets the JLA once in a while, so there's a start. (And some people are giving me the idea that I might enjoy Green Lantern, which is pretty weird because my recollection of him from my childhood is as about as scintillating as dry toast.) Or is this just a bad time to start into DC? Didn't they just do another restart of some sort?
Because from reading some of the commentary on the aforementioned subject of Marvel and DC blogs (like this one at The Absorbascon) I don't seem like a typical Marvel reader. Possibly I'm getting this impression because most of the folks posting here are DC fans and are more familiar with the good points of the company they read, but you know, if there are also good DC books that I'd like, I'd like to know about them. A point made in the comments there--that DC fans tend to be verbally oriented and Marvel fans visually (I don't get this impression from the DC books my kids read, but they don't read that many of them)--interesting to me because while I notice when the art is bad, I pay more attention to the dialogue and characterization. Also, I don't read the X-books (fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me...and that was 15 years ago and I still won't read an X-book!), and I think if you eliminate that section of the Marvel fan base you find a different reader. (Not that I'm saying there's anything non-subjectively wrong with the X-books. My daughter loves them. She is, you will recall, eleven. She finds books like Captain America tedious, and I think it's likely that she is representative of a segment of the readership.)
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